Coping With Loss
by wisedomsdaughter
Summary: (Terrible title) It hurts much more when you lose someone then it should... Angst fics involving PJO characters.


The Moon, Silence, and Sand Between Her Toes

Characters: Percy J. Annabeth C.

Trigger warning: character death

A jacket is wrapped around her shoulders, it's warmth bringing a false feeling of his arms wrapped around her.

It still smells like him, she thinks, but the smell of the sea and salty wind and chlorine and sugar cubes is fading fast, and she dreads the day it will be gone forever.

The moon shines bright and beautiful in the sky, shining down like a spotlight on the ocean that would look so much better if a green-eyed Son of Poseidon were there with her. She wonders if he can see her from where he was. Maybe he is finally turned into a god and is waiting for the right time to claim her as his immortal wife.

They'd barely touched on the subject of marriage, but they were practically a married couple anyway, despite the short period of time they'd actually been together. She counted the time they spent apart as the time they were a couple, seeing as they hadn't broken up and she still talked to his pictures when she was alone. Besides, she spent most of the time talking and he listening during their actual relationship, so it was almost the same.

She remembers how she didn't - wouldn't - believe it at first. How she continued insisting to anyone who would listen that he was most definitely alive, and that he was Percy Jackson, he couldn't be dead.

For months she was in denial, (though she claimed that she wasn't,) and although Grover probably knew that Percy was dead, he continued to humor her until he finally cracked and told her he could sense that the empathy link was broken, and Percy was dead.

She cried and cursed Percy to the high heavens, although it was never his fault. He died protecting her from the barrage of monsters hurtling at them as they struggled to close the Doors, pushing her through and trapping himself in. She burned the picture of him and her that was framed in his locker because the happy smiles seemed to mock her of the past.

In the cold, long months that came, she regretted burning it and scoured computers and hard drives for it. She never found it.

It seemed like a gray veil had been put over her eyes, and she kept her head low so that all she saw was the sidewalk with the gum on it where she and Percy would walk to the corner shop or when they danced to no music and they were both laughing.

She walked the places where he had been, because even though she knew he was gone, she couldn't stop searching.

Once, they'd danced around the benches in Central Park and she couldn't stop herself from copying the steps they took as if it were a spell that would bring him back. It didn't, and all she could do was cry.

She went to the corner shop every day, even though seeing the familiar shelves and cheery old woman acting as the cashier hurt her. Once, she saw a raven haired guy wearing the Goode jacket Percy always wore, and for a moment she thought it was Percy. But then the boy turned around and his face wasn't the chiseled perfection of the boy she loved. She turned away as he walked past her and the bright blue cherry coke he held in his hand was the kind Percy always drank in a can.

A thousand memories she had taken for granted, all because she had assumed there would be a thousand more.

In her hand she holds a paper ring he'd gave her as a joke, the fragile paper poor competition to the silver promise ring he'd given her that she'd thrown into the sea the night Grover told her he was dead.

She'd tried to tell herself that she was lucky for those months she had with him, but how could mere months compare with what could have been decades?

The beach is as silent as the dance of a falling leaf. She's the only one who sits there to remember the fallen hero, a fact she'd found pitiful but peaceful. She'd told herself that now she had a closer connection to Percy, and the moon was one they shared, the stars twinkling for them, the sand beneath her toes was sand they'd ran through together.

But she knows the only ones who are with her now is the moon, silence, and sand beneath her toes.

[I hope you've enjoyed. The tenses are weird because I mixed past with present. And yes, I know it's so lame to have the end of the story be the title.]


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